Fracking Fan Ernest Moniz Confirmed As U.S. Energy Secretary

From Earth Techling:  Fracking Fan Ernest Moniz Confirmed As U.S. Energy Secretary

With a unanimous vote, the United States Senate confirmed MIT professor Ernest Moniz as the new secretary of the Department of Energy. Unlike Obama’s pick for head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Moniz received support from both sides of the aisle, with the only delay coming from Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) who was protesting Obama’s plan to cut funding from a project in his state.

Moniz, who was an energy undersecretary in the Clinton administration, replaces Steven Chu, who served as energy secretary in Obama’s first term. Although his acceptance into the office was fairly conflict free, the new DOE secretary will face many challenges over the next few years, and his decisions will likely shape America’s energy future long beyond his tenure in office.


“Moniz is the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics and Engineering Systems, as well as the director of the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) and the Laboratory for Energy and the Environment,” reports the school. “At MIT, Moniz has also served previously as head of the Department of Physics and as director of the Bates Linear Accelerator Center. His principal research contributions have been in theoretical nuclear physics and in energy technology and policy studies. He has been on the MIT faculty since 1973.”

Perhaps it was his work in nuclear energy and praise for coal and fracking that allowed him to escape the Conservative gauntlet that has been thrown down for Gina McCarthy, Obama’s pick for the EPA.

Unfortunately, these characteristics don’t bode well for human and environmental health, nor the renewable energy industry. Environmental groups lost no time in reminding him of the volatile energy issues currently facing the U.S. and urging decisions that move us away from fossil fuels for good.

“To do what is right by the American public, we need Secretary Moniz to go all in on smart energy and climate solutions, like solar, wind, and energy efficiency and to protect our children’s health and future, while creating jobs for American workers,” said Deb Nardone, the Sierra Club’s Beyond Natural Gas Campaign Director, in a statement.

 

Take your blood pressure medication

Spent most of yesterday in the hospital, where my mother was admitted. Her doctor had changed her blood pressure medication a couple of weeks ago, it wasn't doing the job. Unfortunately her doctor was out of town and a home therapist said we should take her to the Emergency Room.

Bad idea, as far as I'm concerned. Put her back on her old medication which was working, just causing her to cough.

Instead we brought her to the emergency room, and since she's old and deaf, this got her more stressed out and scared than ever, because they were all gathered around her shouting questions and wanting to run tests and I'm sure she thought she was dying or something, which sent her blood pressure even higher.

She spent the night there, and is still in today for more tests, which I don't think she needs but I guess since they've got her in there they want to get their money's worth out of our insurance...  she's in a private room which must be costing a fortune....

The reason for my headline... she was about 40 when she was first diagnosed with high blood pressure...took pills for a couple of days but didn't like how they made her feel....so she stopped taking them and tried to do the "natural remedy" thing.

Result, 20 years later she had congestive heart failure, and now instead of taking 1 pill a day she has to take 4. And has to go into the hospital periodically on occasions like these.

Moral of the story - go get your blood pressure checked, and if you have high blood pressure make sure you take your meds, otherwise believe me you'll wish you had, when it is too late...

Never get involved in a land war in Asia

and never agree to transcribe 20 hours of meetings from an Australian business meeting.

That's what I've been doing for the last 4 days...utter nightmare. Could NOT understand their accents. Making it worse were the bad audio levels and the fact that a lot of the people preesnt insisted on talking over each other from all around the room except in front of the microphone... I will never transcribe ANYTHING every again.

Anyway, so sorry to be MIA from my blogs.

Nuclear Physics in the Time of Austerity

From To Think To Write To Publish blog: Nuclear Physics in the Time of Austerity
The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider spends its days slamming tiny particles of gold together, helping physicists peer back in time to what the universe looked like a fraction of a second after the Big Bang. It’s also hanging on by a thread, abandoned by the department that’s supposed to be fighting on its behalf.
Granted, RHIC is used to making do with what it has. It’s never been the biggest or the most powerful. Its discoveries aren’t announced via global press conferences followed by all-night parties. It never even had a chance of finding the Higgs boson. Physicists who work with RHIC patch up its problem areas with packing tape and bring their own coffee cups to overnight shifts because the Department of Energy can’t afford to provide them.
Now the DOE says it can’t afford RHIC, either. It wants to build a new machine to study the rare elements streaming out of dying stars, and maybe figure out what we can do with them here on Earth. But money is tight. So the U.S.’s final collider has to go, a sacrificial victim at only 13 years old. The last accelerator to be shut down died at lively 28.
My TWP collaborator and I are writing about the Superconducting Super Collider, another particle accelerator the U.S. decided it couldn’t afford. Unlike RHIC, however, the SSC died when it was still just a hole in the ground, a good ten years before it could have started doing science. Expensive and constantly over-budget, the SSC imploded on the floor of the House in 1993. Contrary to the DOE’s current logic, we didn’t use the money we saved to build $11 billion worth of better, cheaper, newer physics projects. We just flooded the hole and handed our high energy physicists a ticket to CERN.
Considering the DOE panel follows its recommendation to close RHIC by painting a picture of a rosier future in which the U.S. gets to do all the nuclear physics it wants with the help of only “modest budget increases,” the threat to RHIC’s life might be a bluff—but it’s one Congress will probably call, if the SSC is any indication. And if it does, the money saved on RHIC will likely disappear. Shutting down one Big Science project doesn’t mean you get to use that money for another one. It means you don’t get that money at all.
RHIC might not be a shiny new toy, and the science it does might not be particularly sexy. But at least it’s up and running. We shouldn’t walk away under the delusional belief that something better will come along. The SSC proved the government can’t be expected to prioritize new physics experiments during times of economics stress. Twenty years later, we shouldn’t sacrifice RHIC for a dream that won’t come true.

Dalton Nuclear Facility

THis is the front page of the Dalton Nuclear Facility website. The info there is interesting:

Nuclear physics facilities

The Dalton Nuclear Institute incorporates comprehensive nuclear physics facilities which support fundamental and applied research in nuclear reactor design and detector systems. Our facilities include:

• Detector Development Laboratory (and associated design and mechanical workshop facilities)
• Nuclear Codes Suite
• Reactor Simulator Suite
• Nuclear Practical Laboratory for education and training

Research focus

The Detector Development Laboratory is used to design, machine, construct and commission detector systems for international experimental nuclear physics programmes. The lab has expertise in detection and identification of heavy ions using large area gas detectors, an expertise unique in the UK. The group also subscribes to access the n_TOF pulsed neutron facility at CERN to make neutron capture and fission cross section measurements.
The Nuclear Codes Suite provides access to the RED QUEEN high-performance computer cluster. The facility supports a range of industry-standard codes - including the ANSWERS software suite - for reactor core analysis, criticality and spent fuel inventory calculations and radiation transport for radiation shielding and detector design.
The complementary Reactor Simulator Suite includes a number of PC desktop-based reactor simulators, as well as the GSE Systems 'VPanel' physical unit. These are used to teach reactor operation principles using several reactor plant models.
The Nuclear Practical Laboratory is used primarily for education and training of undergraduate and postgraduate students in the properties of radiation. It is equipped with state-of-the-art detectors which are also used for research.

The Nuclear Practical Laboratory is used primarily for education and training of undergraduate and postgraduate students in the properties of radiation, and is equipped with state-of-the-art detectors which are also used for research.

Laboratory facilities and capabilities

Our comprehensive nuclear physics laboratories offer:
 

• Expertise in the design, machining, construction and commissioning of radiation detector systems
• Large area gas detectors capable of detecting and identifying heavy ions
• Access to the RED QUEEN high-performance computer cluster (800 cores)
• Simulations which support the ANSWERS suite of codes, as well as MCNP, GEANT4, FLUKA and FISPIN
• State-of-the-art detectors

Access arrangements

Please contact the Dalton Nuclear Institute if you wish to access any of our facilities or equipment for publicly funded projects or to support proprietary industry-focused research. Access to our facilities may be available through collaborative agreements or purchased access arrangements.

 

OMG!

Never realized I hadn't posted in over 2 weeks!

Sorry, folks

Things have just gotten away from me the last week and a half...posting should be back on schedule starting this weekend.

Posting resumes Thursday

I know I've been saying this periodically but this will be the last time I say it...I'm visiting relatives and although they have Wi fi I don't have a private room to work.

I'll be home Thursaday and will get back into the swing of things then.

Hitching a ride on a nuclear physicist's podcast

From SteelScience:  Hitching a ride on a nuclear physicist's podcast

“I'm not saying Boots are the Mafia... Nivea for Men are,” Matt Gunther, nuclear physics PhD student, laughed as he aired his frustrations on the price of suntan lotion. In one of many strident opinions, he compares the skin protection industry to “how the Mafia would do captive business... if you don’t buy it you’re going to get cancer.”

We had somehow gone off on a tangent, but from his response to overpriced sun products, he is clearly a passionate guy.

I went to meet Matt on a rainy afternoon in Manchester to learn about his popular podcast “Hitchhiker's Guide to Nuclear”, where he and his co-host, Matt Gill, dispel the myths, update the  news, and generally chat, in an hour long frenzy of all things nuclear.

Matt is on the Nuclear FiRST PhD, a joint doctoral training centre between The University of Sheffield and The University of Manchester.

He is part of the University of Manchester’s Nuclear Society who aim to “educate and inform the public as to how nuclear energy, as well as radiation and other related issues, affect us all”.

The 25 year old is a far cry from the stereotypical physicists portrayed in popular culture. He is not socially awkward, not afraid of the opposite sex, and not chained to his lab; starved of sunlight for the sake of research.

Although he does admit to enjoying a good science joke and I do catch a sneaky glimpse of a Marvel superhero postcard, stuck to the side of his computer, he’s definitely no Sheldon Cooper or Leonard Hofstadter.
iTunes following

Their monthly podcast began back in March, and for a small project that started out in Matt’s basement flat, it has gathered quite a following.

Each new episode receives about 1,500-2,000 hits, and they have around 200 unique subscribers on iTunes.

“I want to say it was by complete design,” he tells me when I ask him where the idea stemmed from. “But it wasn’t.”

In actual fact, it was started through irritation. “There was a news piece about nuclear on BBC news, it really got under my skin. I was fed up of people from the nuclear industry, as well as journalists, being very dry about the issue.
“The problem is that nuclear is such a divisive subject, you will always get extremists on both side, but they will never admit that, and then the journalists will be just as extreme.”

He tells me that he thinks the route of the misunderstandings surrounding nuclear energy , is because it is painted as such an uninteresting and dangerous topic, and it needs to be communicated in a better way.

“I suppose we wanted to do something where we got people engaged with nuclear as a subject, and to do that, we had to one, talk about new and media, and two, make it entertaining.”

The success of the venture has been born from people in the industry picking up on it, and tweeting and blogging about them.

Ironically, they have found that wherever nuclear is least popular is where they are most popular, gathering a following from Japan, Germany and the USA.

Having a listen through their back catalogue of podcasts, they have clearly gone from strength to strength, and I am thoroughly engrossed in their fascinating, thought-provoking, and often quite amusing window into the world of nuclear.
Episode guide

Each episode discusses a different issue, so far covering: radiation, weapons, Fukushima, and the economy.

The show usually includes guest speakers who join the hosts in debate and chatter with interjections of radiation and nuclear themed music separating each section.

They have also taken to the streets interviewing the public and finding out their thoughts and their misconceptions about nuclear.

“We asked the public what’s the first thing that comes into your head when you hear the word radiation? Nine time out of ten it was bomb, death or danger, that sort of thing, we then gave them some other examples, and they were quite surprised about where radiation can actually come from.”

The latest episodes talks about ‘The Nuclear Waste Problem’ and what the UK are planning to do with it, as well as relaying the bizarre story about the nuclear submarine commander who tried to end his affair by faking his own death, amongst other topics.

As nuclear energy has been moving ever more into the limelight over the last new month, ‘Hitchhiker's guide to Nuclear” is bound see ever increasing popularity.

Matt is modest about the endeavour, and hopes it colours the industry in a more interesting, and relatable way than current media: “We have been very fortunate with how it’s blossomed, people have said its good, and hopefully we are doing something good for the industry.”